Getting loot is fun. Not so much when it's not the loot you want right? Imagine running through high level maps pressing one button. Or wow... maybe two buttons. I know this is hard for some of yall to imagine. Two buttons is some big brain time. But you're running through these maps pressing one button and you don't get any good loot. Or not enough at least. Now imagine the combat is actually seeable, the enemies are responsive, the loot is balanced for less kills to provide more loot, and the people who want to be engaged with the killing itself are happy. Then it's the combat that's fun. Even if you don't get what you wanted, you are having fun. So let me ask yall methodical combat naysayers something. If yall played yall's typical zooming build through high level maps, and didn't get a single loot drop, would you still be having fun? And if you are having fun, how long do you think that fun would last when not getting loot. If the answer is NOT THAT LONG... then the combat is not engaging.
E: I'm saying if you take loot out of the equation FIRST, then we can get down to the root of "engaging combat." Because there are lots of forms of engaging combat. Batman arkham asylum, dark souls, and baldurs gate gate 3 are all completely different games and all could be argued to have engaging combat. It's just in what way would THIS game have to cultivate it.
Yall are arguing against slowing the game down and suggesting that paced combat isn't engaging. But is it the loot that's engaging for yall or are yall actually talking about engaging combat? Nothing wrong with loot being engaging. I just don't think that it should be the only thing. I think it should be secondary to the core of gameplay.
+1
I think if the pace is slower, loot might even feel better. Like if there are less rares and you need more time to kill them, they should drop that much more loot, no? So less rares that just drop nothing!
When the people are happy for this cause they need to visit psychotherapist until something irreparable happened.
Not much else to say about the whole argument of enganging combat/one click combat. Except the fact that it's pointless. If it seemed that 0.1 was close, engaging blaw-blaw-blaw, it only seemed so due to lack of balance.
Because the basic concept of poe2 is the Atlas with endless amount of explorable nodes, they improve it with every patch, paying a lot of attention to this feature. How far you can go with slow combat, it is just incompatible with this concept, especially given how large the maps are. And again they are not going to change it either. First they gave checkpoints, now they gave sprint, they offer compromise but not going to change map sizes it seems.
How many freaks you will find out there who spend 1000 hours a league and will explore Atlas at decent extent while enjoying enganging combat during an hour on every map? Like 5-10k, right? It's not the numbers they want.
You know they can just change up the atlas a bit? Probably the easiest thing to change... Could just let us skip to any map in a explored towers range and you have the speed back... Or some other mechanic that lets you travel.
Dernière édition par KäsePizza#3007, le 23 sept. 2025 à 19:03:28
May be we need some kind of "/players X" for maps for engaging combat that feels good.
You kill less but harder monsters, but gain more than if you blasting through hundreds of mobs at the same time.
Probably atlas tree would have something like this one day, so we can configure the packsize of the maps to our wishes without forcing to play zoomy or slow for everyone.
Dernière édition par Nikuksis#6962, le 23 sept. 2025 à 18:55:15
May be we need some kind of "/players X" for maps for engaging combat that feels good.
You kill less but harder monsters, but gain more than if you blasting through hundreds of mobs at the same time.
Probably atlas tree would have something like this one day, so we can configure the packsize of the maps to our wishes without forcing to play zoomy or slow for everyone.
I think trying to fit the zooming with high packsize and engaging combat into the same game just wont work. The monsters wont work for both. If the player is fast you need on-death effects and skills that can still kill him, which in turn is just terrible design for slower, engaging combat I think. So just monster getting tougher, less and drop more loot wont work. Also the zoomy playstyle needs tons of movementspeed, attackspeed and screenwide AoE, the other one just shouldnt have those.
I think trying to make both audiences happy is the worst idea here.
I think trying to fit the zooming with high packsize and engaging combat into the same game just wont work. The monsters wont work for both. If the player is fast you need on-death effects and skills that can still kill him, which in turn is just terrible design for slower, engaging combat I think. So just monster getting tougher, less and drop more loot wont work. Also the zoomy playstyle needs tons of movementspeed, attackspeed and screenwide AoE, the other one just shouldnt have those.
I imagine that if the monsters would be like x8 health and x4 damage and x1/4 packsize(numbers are just for exxample, for sure its a huge work for balancing this) there won't be a reason to build tons of movementspeed, attackspeed and screenwide AoE.
I think trying to make both audiences happy is the worst idea here.
I kinda agree with that statement, but what we see now is exactly the attempt of eating the pie and have it too...
Other than that i can't explain why we have skills like parry / raise shield and all those combos which are 80% of skills, and such packsize on even low level magic maps and league content like breach/delirium and abyss...
E: I'm saying if you take loot out of the equation FIRST, then we can get down to the root of "engaging combat." Because there are lots of forms of engaging combat. Batman arkham asylum, dark souls, and baldurs gate gate 3 are all completely different games and all could be argued to have engaging combat. It's just in what way would THIS game have to cultivate it.
I said this in my very first post in this thread lol. it's also something that CANNOT BE DONE.
You cannot "take the loot out" of a loot-based game.
And if you do exactly as you describe: temporarily remove the loot, figure out combat, add loot back in......you are left with d3-like lootsplosions. No matter what. And the SLOWER the gamepace is, the greater those explosions need to be.
It is the most disengaging form of loot hunt at that point, in a game where 99% of the game loop is the LOOT. Loot has many problems in both PoE 1 and PoE 2, but that type of design would be worse than both.
Not only that, but it fundamentally changes the game loop, and brings problems that some people have already complained about the CURRENT zoom zoom creating: if all monsters take 10x as long to kill, and they are few and far between....it encourages gameplay of skipping nearly every fight EXCEPT the ones that will actually give you the most rewards.
You would end up spending magnitudes more time OUTSIDE of the very combat you want to engage in.
And if loot ends up concentrated in, say, 5 fights instead of 50....that results in you STOPPING for a much longer extended period of time looking through a pile loot instead
There's a good reason we don't have loot goblins in this game....
And again.....these ideas stem from BAD comparisons to games completely outside of the genre you are currently playing. You are trying to turn the game loop you are choosing to play into something that doesn't belong or work in the system. You say "pleasing everyone" won't work.......crossing genres is WAY WORSE. You end up with NO audience that way: a loot arpg that fails at loot. A souls-like that fails at being difficult. A platformer that tries to function as an rts. Etc. I could find perfect versions of EACH of those types of games that would do it better than a PoE 2 designed in such a way woudl EVER do.
Starting anew....with PoE 2
Dernière édition par cowmoo275#3095, le 23 sept. 2025 à 19:33:37
I think trying to fit the zooming with high packsize and engaging combat into the same game just wont work. The monsters wont work for both. If the player is fast you need on-death effects and skills that can still kill him, which in turn is just terrible design for slower, engaging combat I think. So just monster getting tougher, less and drop more loot wont work. Also the zoomy playstyle needs tons of movementspeed, attackspeed and screenwide AoE, the other one just shouldnt have those.
I imagine that if the monsters would be like x8 health and x4 damage and x1/4 packsize(numbers are just for exxample, for sure its a huge work for balancing this) there won't be a reason to build tons of movementspeed, attackspeed and screenwide AoE.
I think trying to make both audiences happy is the worst idea here.
I kinda agree with that statement, but what we see now is exactly the attempt of eating the pie and have it too...
Other than that i can't explain why we have skills like parry / raise shield and all those combos which are 80% of skills, and such packsize on even low level magic maps and league content like breach/delirium and abyss...
I think the only thing slower gameplay might work with is bosses. But instead of only talking about slow and fast gameplay, we should talk about engaging combat.
Like what makes combat engaging? I dont think sending out 20 Arc's against a rare instead of 2 will make combat any more engaging in the current PoE2 - only worse. Just sending more of the same skill, which is what probably would happen, wont make this any more fun.
If you want engaging combat you need enemies that pose challenges and you need something to overcome those challenges. This can be stronger gear that reduces the time you need to kill, skills that help you or simply mechanical skill as a player.
The thing is if you just make less enemies that are tankier (and even deal more damage) you wont get that imo. I don't think the rare mobs are designed well for that. They are designed to kill zooming players...
Dernière édition par KäsePizza#3007, le 23 sept. 2025 à 19:37:59
Maybe Atlas should have a starting point that, for example, points us north.
Turning west, we're taken to maps that are compatible with Zoom Zoom, of course, with mechanics that match them, e.g., Breach, more mobs, more currency drops.
Turning east, we arrive at a place with fewer creatures, fewer currency drops, and a large number of bosses. Maybe even in every location with mechanics like Betrayal from PoE 1. The reward for this is powerful crafting items, like omens, which aren't available on the west side "zoom side".
Just saying...
Going more north we finding more citadels and endgame bosses plus some corrupted zones and maybe some super deadly unique maps like Valdo's map in poe 1
E: I'm saying if you take loot out of the equation FIRST, then we can get down to the root of "engaging combat." Because there are lots of forms of engaging combat. Batman arkham asylum, dark souls, and baldurs gate gate 3 are all completely different games and all could be argued to have engaging combat. It's just in what way would THIS game have to cultivate it.
I said this in my very first post in this thread lol. it's also something that CANNOT BE DONE.
You cannot "take the loot out" of a loot-based game.
And if you do exactly as you describe: temporarily remove the loot, figure out combat, add loot back in......you are left with d3-like lootsplosions. No matter what. And the SLOWER the gamepace is, the greater those explosions need to be.
It is the most disengaging form of loot hunt at that point, in a game where 99% of the game loop is the LOOT. Loot has many problems in both PoE 1 and PoE 2, but that type of design would be worse than both.
Not only that, but it fundamentally changes the game loop, and brings problems that some people have already complained about the CURRENT zoom zoom creating: if all monsters take 10x as long to kill, and they are few and far between....it encourages gameplay of skipping nearly every fight EXCEPT the ones that will actually give you the most rewards.
You would end up spending magnitudes more time OUTSIDE of the very combat you want to engage in.
And if loot ends up concentrated in, say, 5 fights instead of 50....that results in you STOPPING for a much longer extended period of time looking through a pile loot instead
There's a good reason we don't have loot goblins in this game....
And again.....these ideas stem from BAD comparisons to games completely outside of the genre you are currently playing. You are trying to turn the game loop you are choosing to play into something that doesn't belong or work in the system. You say "pleasing everyone" won't work.......crossing genres is WAY WORSE. You end up with NO audience that way: a loot arpg that fails at loot. A souls-like that fails at being difficult. A platformer that tries to function as an rts. Etc. I could find perfect versions of EACH of those types of games that would do it better than a PoE 2 designed in such a way woudl EVER do.
Yea, loot would be so much worse if you kill 1 rare in a the same place you would normally kill 5 and they drop similar loot! And looking at 5 lootpiles of size 10 will ofc need so much more time than 50 lootpiles of size 1...
Also nobody said anything about crossing genres, did they? He just made his argument by taking 3 completly different games, saying they all have engaging combat, but are completly different. Like PoE is different from all of them, but it could have its own form of engaging combat.
But oh no, this wont work. I mean, the all-knowing cowmoo said so, so how could it be fun for anyone?
Maybe Atlas should have a starting point that, for example, points us north.
Turning west, we're taken to maps that are compatible with Zoom Zoom, of course, with mechanics that match them, e.g., Breach, more mobs, more currency drops.
Turning east, we arrive at a place with fewer creatures, fewer currency drops, and a large number of bosses. Maybe even in every location with mechanics like Betrayal from PoE 1. The reward for this is powerful crafting items, like omens, which aren't available on the west side "zoom side".
Just saying...
Going more north we finding more citadels and endgame bosses plus some corrupted zones and maybe some super deadly unique maps like Valdo's map in poe 1
Interesting idea, but I think monster and skill design just need to be too different for zooming/engaging combat. Also would be balance hell Id guess.
